Then they've got you on copyright infringement. I don't know which is worse, copyright industry or shadowy government operatives. At least the shadowy government operatives give you vacations to exotic locales where you can explore local traditions and all the water you could ever want!
Airport security is a fucking joke. These are people who are somewhere between mall cop and mannequin with a uniform on it. Most of their knowledge of encryption comes from cereal box decoder rings and what they see on CSI (or for more stupidity, anything by Dan Brown). If your computer can turn on and show some sort of boot screen, they won't know the difference, let alone if you have a file buried on your hard drive that's really an encrypted partition.
Besides, everyone knows that if you are doing illegal things, you keep rings of encryption (whole disk encryption, which decrypted leaves a functioning OS and maybe a few games or basics, then maybe a layer of your personal financial/medical data that you're pretty sure they already know, then a layer of regular porn, then a layer of embarrassing porn, then maybe some minor misdeeds that could get you a slap on the wrist, then a layer of the most brain bleach worthy pics off/b/, then anything you really want to hide). Simple, really. Of course, the better solution is to not fly with a laptop full of incriminating evidence (or to have a 4th amendment that actually means something).
You're not paying less to for a machine with less performance. You're paying more for the machines where you do get performance. If the "low end" chips weren't making a tidy profit, they wouldn't be sold. What they're doing is akin to if Coke came out with a "Coke with added fecal matter" brand coke priced where the regular coke is now, but doubled the price of regular coke (insert joke about New Coke here). Neither one has higher production costs, yet clearly Shit Coke was implemented only to gauge more profit out of consumers. Now imagine that coke sells 85% of all drinks (assume you're trapped in Atlanta), and has performed a large number of underhanded tricks to undermine all the other competition. Are you going to be singing the praises of Shit Coke as being the coke you drink when you don't care if something tastes like ass, but you'll gladly pay 50 cents more for a pill to go in your Shit Coke to remove the offending taste when you want something a little nicer? Is Shit Coke providing "more and better options" for the customer who may not have taste buds?
What I love are the contortions employers go through to complain that they can't find talented people while doing everything they can to make sure they don't accidentally hire talent.
What they mean is that they can't hire skilled labor for unskilled wages (unless they complain enough to get a ready supply of H1-B's).
The way things should work is that a CS degree ought to be enough for a development position, period. And that no one earns such a degree if they can't develop.
Well, some people manage to get CS degrees without actually understanding anything (via cheating, going to a shitty school, gaming the system, or sheer dumb luck). A lot of people got a CS degree because they thought it would be a golden ticket, yet they don't have any technical acumen or desire to buckle down and figure shit out. That said, there definitely are a lot of unemployed yet very skilled technical workers right now.
I think it nearly was that easy to get professional work in the 1950's. But now?
The 1950s was a time of economic boom. Not only that, but it was probably the first time period where average people could get a college education (thanks to the GI Bill). Even for the non-college educated you had a large manufacturing base and strong unions. You could probably make an argument that the American dream of a nuclear family in a house with a white picket fence was a much healthier dream to have than our current "get rich quick, live in giant mansion driving Ferrari" mentality. Corporations were not quite the same unaccountable multinational blobs that they are now. The average person knew nothing about Wall Street (ok, that part hasn't changed much). Overall, people could get a job as a craftsman on a factory floor right out of high school and make enough to live well and take care of a family and be promoted within the company till retirement. Now, for all practical purposes you need to drop thousands on a college education to apply for even most entry level positions at places (and for most of those, you still won't be well off financially), and you'll still be laid off at the drop of a hat if the company thinks they can outsource the work to $Poverty_Stricken_Country, all so Bill Lumbergh's stock can go up a quarter of a point.
Really though, where's our Teddy Roosevelt to kick some corporate asses? Could you even imagine a politician today trying to actually prosecute to the point of breaking up companies (rather than settling out of court for less than what the company gained by their bad behavior)? If Microsoft had been broken up in it's antitrust case, would companies be a bit more cautious about ignoring the law?
Let's say that you buy a house, but then the builder says "oh, yeah, there's this room in the back that's bricked up but it'll give you a bunch of extra space", can that builder restrict your ability to open up the back room using license agreements, etc (especially after all the other paperwork is done, filled out, and cash has been exchanged)? Do you have to pay that builder some more money to get the room which you weren't expecting but now know about? If you don't pay him and open it up yourself, do you lose the right to complain about a furnace breaking the day after you move in or toxic mold in the attic that wasn't mentioned?
The real question is if we should really encourage artificial barriers to computer performance just to improve a company's bottom line. To me it just feels wrong.
Adequate optimization of economic systems is a major reason that the United States has done such a good job of getting absurdly wealthy, despite having a smaller population base and comparable natural resources to other major powers.
It also helps that we didn't get bombed to rubble in WW2.
And we're the third most populous country in the world.
And we've got a crapload of natural resources. Considering that some of our states are larger than some major European countries, that's not terribly surprising.
Are tapes still the the highest density (as in bits/volume) consumer/business grade hardware there is, or is a stack of thumb drives more space efficient? Can anyone calculate the actual bandwidth of a modern equivalent traveling from say, New York City to Boston (though presumably that would depend on traffic).
Fair enough. Quite frankly, I find the whole Tarasoff ruling to be abhorrent for that very reason. It puts way too much power in the doctor's hands to use their own judgment (and worse, be liable if they don't) as to what is or isn't reasonable suspicion of a credible threat, and given that there are a number of psychiatric "professionals" who are graduating from fundamentalist colleges either with a psychology degree or something like a "Christian Social Work" degree, it's a fucked up situation.
Hell, it's probably even worse than that since most states put stronger protections of priest-penitent privilege than they do on mental health professional privilege.
It's only been 35 years since we last had a draft, and we still have to register. I'll believe that there's no use for a draft when they stop requiring the registration for one. As it is the military has no problem ignoring it's own contracts via stop loss, as well as using individual augmentees (12,000 of them) from the Air Force and Navy to fill in for Army roles, and using National Guard units for far longer than they were intended to be used for (and in much higher levels than they've ever been used). You can damn well bet that they'll see a dent in the number of active duty personnel that they want for years/decades, and if we get into a real war with someone who actually has a serviceable military (China, North Korea, Iran, etc), I doubt we could really face them in a knock down drag out fight, at least if we take the fight to them. We may have enough power in our aircraft carriers to blow any (and probably every) navy to scrap that would try to hit us, but we don't have the numbers to really hold ground like we did in WW2.
if he seeks help the psychiatrist MUST report him to the cops where he will be thrown in prison and then booted out into a world where he is a pariah just for THOUGHTS he may have had
It was my understanding that Tarasoff warnings are only applicable if there is knowledge of specific targets for the murder/rape/assault/abuse, and even then that warning does not constitute an abridgment of doctor-patient confidentiality (in cases where it applies in the first place).
I think my biggest complaint when parents bring 5-10 year olds to violent movies is that the kids are always fucking obnoxious. I don't need their noise. Hell, I remember seeing Predators a few months ago and some parent brought their infant and 3 year old child, and the kids proceeded to make a fucking mess, were noisy and walking around. If the parent wants to see it, why can't they get a baby sitter? Yet another reason I prefer watching movies at home to going to the theater.
There's also the fact that 2,100 people is a very small number to base any sort of national (or even state) law and policy on. What are the survey demographics? What are the statistically significant differences of opinion based on group? What is the study's power to detect (a significant difference 80% of the time)? Was the survey terminology defined to the participants, or if not - were there survey questions to obtain the participants' definitions of the terms?
The biggest question: Has anyone in the survey played any video games in the last, say, 20 years?
And yeah, "ultraviolence" is a difficult term to define. Is Team Fortress 2 "ultraviolent"? It's got people shooting each other, blowing each other up, etc, etc, but personally I see the violence as being in a similar category as old Loony Toons cartoons. Contrast with the Soldier of Fortune series, which is all about gore. One of these is probably perfectly fine to give to a 10 year old (interaction with other players being a wildcard, but meh), but the other I doubt I'd feel comfortable giving to someone who doesn't have some level of maturity.
3. They wanted it to be broken so they can complain to $Government that the filthy pirates keep breaking their perfectly legitimate defensive measures to protect their intellectual property. Expect stricter laws, more criminalization of even talking about breaking DRM, and a push for more "trusted computing" (trusted by big money).
At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums, that downloaded mp3's when they were younger (or still do), and that watched 2 or 3 movies illegally when they were students.
No, they'll be the people that didn't do that (or didn't get caught), so they look squeaky clean to all the voters who would rather have the clean cut person hiding massive corruption and hypocrisy than the politician that openly admits to smoking dope, having premarital sex, and living like an average person (Your grandparents probably didn't only have sex after marriage, underneath blankets, in the dark, in the missionary position. Blowjobs were not invented in the last 40 years.).
If we stop electing the kind of people that are boring enough to appeal to everyone, maybe we'll stop getting laws that suck all the fun out of life.
If you've got very large filing cabinets, and they sift through all your personal documentation, despite one folder being very clearly labeled $Search_Warrant_Specified_Information , they damn well are going well beyond their search warrant and should be slapped down. A search warrant is not an invitation to tear someone's house apart, wall by wall until you either have what you think they have or there's no house left. It's there to find some specific information in the least intrusive manner possible (since you are innocent till proven guilty). Yes, there are cases where a broad search warrant can and should be obtainable, but the judiciary should be weighing the kind of evidence presented to justify a warrant vs the scope of what that warrant wants to search. If the evidence is weak, you don't get to poke into all aspects of someone's life just to see if there's something you can hang him by. If you've got him standing over a dead body with a bloody knife in his hands, sure, get a warrant to tear his house apart and dig up his yard looking for more bodies.
The problem is that Windows tosses a bunch of caching data in all sorts of random directories (good luck finding them all), so even if your main hard drive is nothing but the bare bones windows partition and you keep everything else on separate encrypted disks, if there's a file name like "illegal_picture.jpeg", they'll still point to that and say "AHA, he's done something wrong. Hang him jury!".
The DLC is done when the game is released. They're purposefully taking it out to wring a couple extra bucks out of you on the purchase price. Also note that some publishers have upped their price by $10 in the first place, yet still gouge for DLC. I don't know what they're thinking, other than "hey, these dumb fucks are willing to spend a couple bucks on horse armor and a couple shitty maps, we need to get in on this goldmine!".
Slashdot Mirror
Then they've got you on copyright infringement. I don't know which is worse, copyright industry or shadowy government operatives. At least the shadowy government operatives give you vacations to exotic locales where you can explore local traditions and all the water you could ever want!
Airport security is a fucking joke. These are people who are somewhere between mall cop and mannequin with a uniform on it. Most of their knowledge of encryption comes from cereal box decoder rings and what they see on CSI (or for more stupidity, anything by Dan Brown). If your computer can turn on and show some sort of boot screen, they won't know the difference, let alone if you have a file buried on your hard drive that's really an encrypted partition.
/b/, then anything you really want to hide). Simple, really. Of course, the better solution is to not fly with a laptop full of incriminating evidence (or to have a 4th amendment that actually means something).
Besides, everyone knows that if you are doing illegal things, you keep rings of encryption (whole disk encryption, which decrypted leaves a functioning OS and maybe a few games or basics, then maybe a layer of your personal financial/medical data that you're pretty sure they already know, then a layer of regular porn, then a layer of embarrassing porn, then maybe some minor misdeeds that could get you a slap on the wrist, then a layer of the most brain bleach worthy pics off
You're not paying less to for a machine with less performance. You're paying more for the machines where you do get performance. If the "low end" chips weren't making a tidy profit, they wouldn't be sold. What they're doing is akin to if Coke came out with a "Coke with added fecal matter" brand coke priced where the regular coke is now, but doubled the price of regular coke (insert joke about New Coke here). Neither one has higher production costs, yet clearly Shit Coke was implemented only to gauge more profit out of consumers. Now imagine that coke sells 85% of all drinks (assume you're trapped in Atlanta), and has performed a large number of underhanded tricks to undermine all the other competition. Are you going to be singing the praises of Shit Coke as being the coke you drink when you don't care if something tastes like ass, but you'll gladly pay 50 cents more for a pill to go in your Shit Coke to remove the offending taste when you want something a little nicer? Is Shit Coke providing "more and better options" for the customer who may not have taste buds?
What I love are the contortions employers go through to complain that they can't find talented people while doing everything they can to make sure they don't accidentally hire talent.
What they mean is that they can't hire skilled labor for unskilled wages (unless they complain enough to get a ready supply of H1-B's).
The way things should work is that a CS degree ought to be enough for a development position, period. And that no one earns such a degree if they can't develop.
Well, some people manage to get CS degrees without actually understanding anything (via cheating, going to a shitty school, gaming the system, or sheer dumb luck). A lot of people got a CS degree because they thought it would be a golden ticket, yet they don't have any technical acumen or desire to buckle down and figure shit out. That said, there definitely are a lot of unemployed yet very skilled technical workers right now.
I think it nearly was that easy to get professional work in the 1950's. But now?
The 1950s was a time of economic boom. Not only that, but it was probably the first time period where average people could get a college education (thanks to the GI Bill). Even for the non-college educated you had a large manufacturing base and strong unions. You could probably make an argument that the American dream of a nuclear family in a house with a white picket fence was a much healthier dream to have than our current "get rich quick, live in giant mansion driving Ferrari" mentality. Corporations were not quite the same unaccountable multinational blobs that they are now. The average person knew nothing about Wall Street (ok, that part hasn't changed much). Overall, people could get a job as a craftsman on a factory floor right out of high school and make enough to live well and take care of a family and be promoted within the company till retirement. Now, for all practical purposes you need to drop thousands on a college education to apply for even most entry level positions at places (and for most of those, you still won't be well off financially), and you'll still be laid off at the drop of a hat if the company thinks they can outsource the work to $Poverty_Stricken_Country, all so Bill Lumbergh's stock can go up a quarter of a point.
Really though, where's our Teddy Roosevelt to kick some corporate asses? Could you even imagine a politician today trying to actually prosecute to the point of breaking up companies (rather than settling out of court for less than what the company gained by their bad behavior)? If Microsoft had been broken up in it's antitrust case, would companies be a bit more cautious about ignoring the law?
Let's say that you buy a house, but then the builder says "oh, yeah, there's this room in the back that's bricked up but it'll give you a bunch of extra space", can that builder restrict your ability to open up the back room using license agreements, etc (especially after all the other paperwork is done, filled out, and cash has been exchanged)? Do you have to pay that builder some more money to get the room which you weren't expecting but now know about? If you don't pay him and open it up yourself, do you lose the right to complain about a furnace breaking the day after you move in or toxic mold in the attic that wasn't mentioned?
The real question is if we should really encourage artificial barriers to computer performance just to improve a company's bottom line. To me it just feels wrong.
Aquatar!
Adequate optimization of economic systems is a major reason that the United States has done such a good job of getting absurdly wealthy, despite having a smaller population base and comparable natural resources to other major powers.
It also helps that we didn't get bombed to rubble in WW2.
And we're the third most populous country in the world.
And we've got a crapload of natural resources. Considering that some of our states are larger than some major European countries, that's not terribly surprising.
It might make sense if it's two groups, each group individually is splitting $2.5 million within that group. Maybe?
If there's any justice, it'll be 72 other male virgin engineers.
Are tapes still the the highest density (as in bits/volume) consumer/business grade hardware there is, or is a stack of thumb drives more space efficient? Can anyone calculate the actual bandwidth of a modern equivalent traveling from say, New York City to Boston (though presumably that would depend on traffic).
human society has evolved beyond the point where we need the other guys to fail so that we can succeed.
You don't get out much, do you?
Can't get a dropped call if you can't get a signal in the first place!
Fair enough. Quite frankly, I find the whole Tarasoff ruling to be abhorrent for that very reason. It puts way too much power in the doctor's hands to use their own judgment (and worse, be liable if they don't) as to what is or isn't reasonable suspicion of a credible threat, and given that there are a number of psychiatric "professionals" who are graduating from fundamentalist colleges either with a psychology degree or something like a "Christian Social Work" degree, it's a fucked up situation.
Hell, it's probably even worse than that since most states put stronger protections of priest-penitent privilege than they do on mental health professional privilege.
It's only been 35 years since we last had a draft, and we still have to register. I'll believe that there's no use for a draft when they stop requiring the registration for one. As it is the military has no problem ignoring it's own contracts via stop loss, as well as using individual augmentees (12,000 of them) from the Air Force and Navy to fill in for Army roles, and using National Guard units for far longer than they were intended to be used for (and in much higher levels than they've ever been used). You can damn well bet that they'll see a dent in the number of active duty personnel that they want for years/decades, and if we get into a real war with someone who actually has a serviceable military (China, North Korea, Iran, etc), I doubt we could really face them in a knock down drag out fight, at least if we take the fight to them. We may have enough power in our aircraft carriers to blow any (and probably every) navy to scrap that would try to hit us, but we don't have the numbers to really hold ground like we did in WW2.
UK ISPs. Not US. The UK doesn't have Congress. They have Parliament.
if he seeks help the psychiatrist MUST report him to the cops where he will be thrown in prison and then booted out into a world where he is a pariah just for THOUGHTS he may have had
It was my understanding that Tarasoff warnings are only applicable if there is knowledge of specific targets for the murder/rape/assault/abuse, and even then that warning does not constitute an abridgment of doctor-patient confidentiality (in cases where it applies in the first place).
I think my biggest complaint when parents bring 5-10 year olds to violent movies is that the kids are always fucking obnoxious. I don't need their noise. Hell, I remember seeing Predators a few months ago and some parent brought their infant and 3 year old child, and the kids proceeded to make a fucking mess, were noisy and walking around. If the parent wants to see it, why can't they get a baby sitter? Yet another reason I prefer watching movies at home to going to the theater.
There's also the fact that 2,100 people is a very small number to base any sort of national (or even state) law and policy on. What are the survey demographics? What are the statistically significant differences of opinion based on group? What is the study's power to detect (a significant difference 80% of the time)? Was the survey terminology defined to the participants, or if not - were there survey questions to obtain the participants' definitions of the terms?
The biggest question: Has anyone in the survey played any video games in the last, say, 20 years?
And yeah, "ultraviolence" is a difficult term to define. Is Team Fortress 2 "ultraviolent"? It's got people shooting each other, blowing each other up, etc, etc, but personally I see the violence as being in a similar category as old Loony Toons cartoons. Contrast with the Soldier of Fortune series, which is all about gore. One of these is probably perfectly fine to give to a 10 year old (interaction with other players being a wildcard, but meh), but the other I doubt I'd feel comfortable giving to someone who doesn't have some level of maturity.
you're forced to sign up to possibly have no choice in doing that in real life
FTFY.
3. They wanted it to be broken so they can complain to $Government that the filthy pirates keep breaking their perfectly legitimate defensive measures to protect their intellectual property. Expect stricter laws, more criminalization of even talking about breaking DRM, and a push for more "trusted computing" (trusted by big money).
At some point, lawmakers will be from the generation that also posts on forums, that downloaded mp3's when they were younger (or still do), and that watched 2 or 3 movies illegally when they were students.
No, they'll be the people that didn't do that (or didn't get caught), so they look squeaky clean to all the voters who would rather have the clean cut person hiding massive corruption and hypocrisy than the politician that openly admits to smoking dope, having premarital sex, and living like an average person (Your grandparents probably didn't only have sex after marriage, underneath blankets, in the dark, in the missionary position. Blowjobs were not invented in the last 40 years.).
If we stop electing the kind of people that are boring enough to appeal to everyone, maybe we'll stop getting laws that suck all the fun out of life.
If you've got very large filing cabinets, and they sift through all your personal documentation, despite one folder being very clearly labeled $Search_Warrant_Specified_Information , they damn well are going well beyond their search warrant and should be slapped down. A search warrant is not an invitation to tear someone's house apart, wall by wall until you either have what you think they have or there's no house left. It's there to find some specific information in the least intrusive manner possible (since you are innocent till proven guilty). Yes, there are cases where a broad search warrant can and should be obtainable, but the judiciary should be weighing the kind of evidence presented to justify a warrant vs the scope of what that warrant wants to search. If the evidence is weak, you don't get to poke into all aspects of someone's life just to see if there's something you can hang him by. If you've got him standing over a dead body with a bloody knife in his hands, sure, get a warrant to tear his house apart and dig up his yard looking for more bodies.
The problem is that Windows tosses a bunch of caching data in all sorts of random directories (good luck finding them all), so even if your main hard drive is nothing but the bare bones windows partition and you keep everything else on separate encrypted disks, if there's a file name like "illegal_picture.jpeg", they'll still point to that and say "AHA, he's done something wrong. Hang him jury!".
The DLC is done when the game is released. They're purposefully taking it out to wring a couple extra bucks out of you on the purchase price. Also note that some publishers have upped their price by $10 in the first place, yet still gouge for DLC. I don't know what they're thinking, other than "hey, these dumb fucks are willing to spend a couple bucks on horse armor and a couple shitty maps, we need to get in on this goldmine!".
You forgot your other chief weapon: Polite words. And Ellen Page. Now there's an invasion that's easy on the eyes.